Stop the Lists! 2023
A Newsletter Post about a Year of Media Consumption
Before Mubi was a streaming website, it was actually a message board for cinephiles that preferred arthouse, obscure, international film. Like literally any message board about any subject in the pre-social media era,1 threads would proliferate either for users to share lists they made or to ask for lists to be made: best movies of all time, best movies of the year, best movies of the year 1939, best Romanian movies of the year 1939, best Romanian movies of the year 1939 not featured on any major film publication or website list, best Romanian movies of the year 1939 not featured on any list yet on Mubi forums, best Romanian movies of the year 1939 no one has ever seen and only exists as a registrar record in an abandoned film indexing periodical published for only three months of 1944 found in a lost library in the forest under the corpse of a hermit who clearly was the world’s greatest cinephile…. you get the picture.
This behavior lead to the famous thread Stop the Lists! or StL! for short, which started out as a meta-commentary about the purpose of film discussion and then became a perpetual top-listed new post thread, until one day it just served as the Mubi forum’s general chat area where you could talk about anything, but where occasionally new users would only read the first page (which ended with the post, “Good luck with your play, Drew!”), skip to the last page (like page 1700 or 2400 or so) and start the debate about the purposes of lists in film discussion all over again.
Indeed, Stop the Lists! turned out to feature many, many lists. I even used StL! to create the ultimate Mubi list, “The Mubi Forum User’s Top 20 Films of All Time” which after a baroque multi-month process of voting and removing and debating and tracking and voting, very very very nearly ended up topped by a six-hour Filipino film with no extant print before users vote-brigaded it off because it was too ironic.2
Anyway, I don’t do best-of-the-year lists and, for well over a decade, didn’t track movies watched or books read or whatever at all. Stop the Lists! was one reason — listing and seeing a million lists can get tiresome — but also I burned out.
In college I used to rate, review, and list pretty much every media I consumed. I’d review everything I’d see on IMDb, I’d track recommendations on Amazon and Movielens, and I’d collate rankings wherever meaningful.
It took a lot of time, and I didn’t realize how wasted that time was until I hit 1000 reviews on IMDb, decided to collect them into a self-published book, and when I started looking through the reviews, realized I didn’t remember many of the movies I had seen, and in a few reviews didn’t even know what I was talking about. I had also binged a ton of books by that point with nary a takeaway to discuss them.
I had spent years greedily intaking anything I could get my hands on, and couldn’t even remember most of it. Listing and tracking media consumption had a terrible consequence of driving me to try to see more movies per year, read more books per year, find more music per year, yadda yadda yadda.
I was also at the beginning of my career and learning that it was far more interesting to make movies than to write about them, and also that it’s not really a great idea to speak ill of movies you don’t like because you never really know whether the person you’re talking to was involved in them.
Because remembering movies was an issue, I took up a laissez-faire attitude about seeing which movies I actually remembered rather than trying to remember them via documentation.
Because remembering movies is an issue, I decided in 2023 to merely track the media, no rankings or ratings or reviews. I opened up a Google Sheet and I titled it Stop the Lists!
I wanted to see if it helped me remember anything or if it showed what I forgot. I was curious to see if I’d end up with best-of lists. I figured I’d tie the lists in to my one-screening-per-week activity.
Here’s the lists: